ArtSciLab researchers Roger Malina and Andrew Blanton will be presenting their work at the inaugural LASER in Austin Texas on March 4.

The LASER series is being organised by JD Talasek, the Cultural Director of the US National Academy of Science. Malina and Blanton will present in particular the ArtSciLab work in collaboration with Professor Gagan Wig of UT Dallas ( http://bbs.utdallas.edu/people/detail.php5?i=1131 )

His research program uses a combination of structural and functional imaging tools (including fMRI, DTI, and TMS) to understand the organization of large-scale human brain networks and how these networks change over the adult-lifespan. The Art Sci Lab is working with him to develop innovative ways of representing the data, in particular using data sonication techniques.

The resulting work is intended to develop scientifically useful research tools but also create compelling art work.

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Join us for

The Inaugural ATX LASER: March 4th , 2014 at 7 p.m.

Space is limited so RSVP today by emailing atxlaser@umlaufsculpture.org

The UMLAUF proudly announces the inauguration of ATX LASER (Austin, Texas – Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous), a salon series culminating at the intersection of art and science. In today’s environment of new technologies and scientific advancements, cultivation of creativity among all areas of human endeavor is paramount to knowledge production and fully understanding the impact of our changing world on the development of our identity within it. Over the next year, this salon will explore such diverse topics as: the impact and creative application of technology; the intersection of anatomy, art and genetics; arts role in environmental education and activism; visualizing and understanding Big Data; building community and communication between disciplines; and much more.

Akin to successful art-science programs in London, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Stanford University, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC David, UC Santa Cruz, and New York City, ATX LASER provides an opportune environment for progressive thought leaders to come together to form community and explore the intersections of disciplinary thinking. ATX LASER welcomes innovators of all types: artists, scientists, curators, scholars, engineers, designers, and educators, to participate. Throughout his life’s work, Charles Umlauf explored the relationship of art and science through both process and symbolism. Emphasizing the importance of sharing ideas and knowledge as a platform of its mission, the UMLAUF offers the ideal creative crucible for seemingly unrelated disciplines to reconvene.

Each ATX LASER session will feature multimedia presentations and three to four speakers, each given the opportunity to address a compelling aspect of their research. Following the presentations, an open discussion will commence where participation is welcomed and encouraged from all attendees. All ATX LASERs are free and open to the public. Please join us at ATX LASER’s launch: Tuesday, March 4th, 2014.

The UMLAUF is proud to be partnering with Leonardo/The International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology (Leonardo/ISAST), a non-profit organization that serves the global network of distinguished scholars, artists, scientists, researchers, and thinkers through programs focused on interdisciplinary work, creative output, and innovation.

ATX LASER was conceived by J.D. Talasek, Scholar-in-Residence, UMLAUF. Talasek is Director of Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. and the founder of that city’s DASER program. His co-organizers for ATX LASER are Katie Robinson Edwards, PhD., UMLAUF Curator, and Diane Sikes, UMLAUF Director of Programs. ATX LASER is made possible through the generous support of J.D. Talasek and the UMLAUF.

At ATX LASER, art and science will unite in the serene environment of Lawrence Speck’s architectural gem amidst the UMLAUF gardens. The UMLAUF was founded in 1991 with the mission of exhibiting the work of Charles Umlauf (1911-1994) and other contemporary sculptors in a natural setting and providing educational experiences that encourage the understanding and appreciation of sculpture. An inventive problem solver, in his lifetime Umlauf engaged with the fields of anatomy, architecture, engineering, and geology. ATX LASER pays homage to Umlauf’s creative vision and will include future sessions relating directly to the sculptor’s vast oeuvre.

The Inaugural ATX LASER: March 4th , 2014 at 7 p.m.

Space is limited so RSVP today by emailing atxlaser@umlaufsculpture.org

SPEAKERS:

o Katie Robinson Edwards , UMLAUF Curator

– TOPIC: A brief introduction on behalf of the UMLAUF

o J.D. Talasek , Moderator.

– TOPIC: “Shaping Community around Creativity and Innovation”

o Roger Malina , Arts and Technology Distinguished Chair, University of Texas at Dallas Roger. Malina is a physicist, astronomer, Executive Editor of Leonardo Publications at MIT Press, Professor of Physics and Associate Director of the Arts and Technology Program at UT Dallas.

– TOPIC: The ArtSciLab at UT Dallas opened in the fall of 2013 with the objective of enabling in depth collaboration between artists and scientists. Our first projects involve manipulating data from astronomy, brain sciences and geo-sciences

o Andrew Blanton , a composer and media artist. Blanton is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Texas at Dallas and is a Research Fellow in the ATEC ArtSciLab.

– TOPIC: interactive installation called MODULATOR, will be co-presenting with Roger Malina

ISEA is one of the world’s most important international academic arts/technology event for the interdisciplinary discussion and showcase of creative productions applying new technologies in art, interactive, electronic and digital media. It’s an event that annually brings together artists, academics, scientists, and new media practitioners.

The symposium consists of three aspects of peer reviewed conference, internationally juried exhibitions, and various in-conjunction and other partner events–from video screenings to performances.

UT Dallas Professor Roger F Malina will be serving on the International Program Committee.

Provide a cooperative environment to inform and promote collaborative efforts of students and faculty to better crowdfund their projects and research.

Description

Providing a collaborative environment for students and faculty to work together in support of their crowdfunding efforts. For example, students with development and engineering ideas can meet with finance and marketing students, as well as video production students, for information sharing regarding crowdfunding techniques and in some instances to cooperatively crowdfund their own projects/research.

Weekly @ ArtSciLab in ATEC 3.209, Date/Time TBD
Participants All interested UTD students, faculty and staff. To register interest in being involved or to learn more, email David Marlett or visit us online at crowdformation.org.

Maximilian Schich has been named a judge for the Web Science 2014 Visualization Challenge

“We are delighted to announce the Web Science 2014 Visualization Challenge!
The web has generated huge amounts of data at massive scale, but making sense of these datasets and representing them in a compact and easily-interpretable way remains very difficult. The goal of this challenge is to encourage innovative visualizations of web data. We particularly encourage entries that reflect the interdisciplinary spirit of the Web Science conference. To enable this visualization, we have prepared several large-scale, easy-to-use, publicly-available datasets:

1. Web traffic data, including more than 200 million HTTP requests from browsers to servers;
2. Twitter data, including a sample of more than 22 million tweets;
3. Social bookmarking data, consisting of about 430,000 bookmarked pages;
4. Co-authorship of academic papers, consisting of about 21.5 million papers and 10.8 million authors

All of the datasets are stored in simple file formats, so that they can be easily used without much technical expertise.

We are pleased to offer a cash prize of at least $1000 to be split among the winning entries. Winners will be announced and displayed at the WebScience conference in June 2014, presented on the WebScience website, and the winners will be encouraged to present a poster at the conference describing their work. The entries will be judged based on four criteria: (1) innovative use of data, (2) clarity of visualization, (3) quality of design, and (4) potential impact.

Rules:
1. For fairness, the visualization must be primarily based on the data that we provide. Other datasets may be used to augment ours, but these datasets must be publicly-available and described in detail in the documentation (see #4 below).
2. The visualization must be a static image, and must be submitted as a PDF. In addition to the main PDF, please submit a PNG version at a resolution of about 640×480, for display on web pages, social media sites, mobile devices, etc. This PNG version need not contain the full visualization, but should be an appropriate representation (e.g. a subset of the full PDF).
3. Please include a separate PDF file containing a description of the visualization, including: (1) name(s), affiliation(s), and contact information of the creator(s), (2) the purpose of the visualization, (3) which dataset(s) were used, (4) a brief description of how the visualizations was created, and (5) any other information you would like to share with the judges.
4. By submitting your visualization, you agree to allow us to display your visualization at the conference and on the Web Science website and social media channels. (We will give proper attribution, of course.) You also certify that you are the copyright holder of the visualization and are authorized to give us this permission.
5. Entries are due by 11:59PM Hawaii time on April 15, 2014. Please e-mail your entry to David Crandall. (If you do not receive a confirmation email within 24 hours, your entry has not been received and should be re-sent.)

“In the summer of 2013, the Arts and Technology program at the University of Texas at Dallas hosted the Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math (abbreviated as STEAM) camp to give an opportunity for high school students to explore various STEAM-related topics.”

The 7th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction (VINCI 2014) provides an international forum for researchers and industrial practitioners to discuss the state of the art in visual communication theories, designs, and applications. VINCI has been previously held in Shanghai (VINCI’2008), Sydney (VINCI’2009), Beijing (VINCI’2010), Hong Kong (VINCI’2011), Hangzhou (VINCI’2012) and Tianjin (VINCI’2013). VINCI ‘2014 will be held on 6-8 August in Sydney, Australia.

Important dates:– Submission of long and short papers: April 8, 2014
– Notification of paper acceptance: May 15, 2014

The participants are asked to “press” a number to answer one of the three questions:

Where is the new excitement in art and technology?
Where are you right now, in the ATEC building?
What is a story about ATEC’s past?

The automated server then puts their various responses into three
sound storage locations: Future-Now-Then.

The score reflects the decision of the participant with the caveat that each new call is placed at the very beginning of the piece in a prelude as all the older calls ripple down into the score to be played in a new time in the context of the re-rendered score. In this way the piece is completely recreated with each new phone call.

CELLPHONIA was developed by Scot Gresham-Lancaster and Steve Bull and is a collaboration between the ATEC Sound Design Research Initiative and the ATEC ArtSciLab.

Research fellow Andrew Blanton will be participating in the Dallas Contemporary’s Alive for 35 celebration opening on Friday November 8th. His work will be a exploration of realtime audio manipulation as well as visualization exploring the tactility of sound through custom software that he has built for the exhibition. For more information: http://dallascontemporary.org/alivefor35.html